The Difference of Indifference: Marcel Duchamp and the Possibilities of Dialogical Personalism

Abstract

Joseph Kosuth, one of Concept Art’s influential practitioners, credited Marcel Duchamp in an important 1969 essay, “Art After Philosophy”, with instigating the shift from the visual to the conceptual by means of indifference and dematerialization. Duchamp’s approach to art was not limited, however, to the realm of artistic intention but also included the (re)contextualization provoked by his readymades. This (re)contextualization elucidated the embodied, dialogical encounters of the artist-artwork-audience, what I identify as an “aesthetics of difference”. This designation sets forth a framework of meaning that draws upon a burgeoning subset of early-twentieth-century personalist philosophy called dialogical personalism in order to offer a more suitable plausibility structure than the usual explanations of Duchamp and his approach to art, which typically revolve around nihilism, absurdity, and a solipsistic understanding of freedom. In doing so, Duchamp’s artistic approach retains not only a more viable ontology for continuing to question the nature of art, but also has important epistemological and ethical implications.